Madra
Madra, by Emma Hutton, won the Mairtin Crawford Award in 2019: My name is Madra. Where I come from it means dog. My mother said that when I was born I was red with fury and howling at the moon. For eighteen years, I have lived in a stone house that’s built on black land that sinks. My blood is close to the skin; you can see the branching of my veins. I like to run my hands over doorframes and pull out the splinters. I like to eat gravy with a spoon. I like to pinch the petals off asters and think about the motherless butcher’s girl.
Southern Cross Constellation
While I was growing up in a small town in Australia, I watched the stars and dreamed of seeing the rest of the world. Now that I have lived in Europe for years, I look back to that side of the world that lies under the Southern Cross constellation.
Simon Collings Surreal Absurd-Sampler
“As a teenager I loved the surreal humour of Monthy Python’s Flying Circus – a programme my parents hated … Python affected me to such an extent that my partner claims it has been the major influence of my life.”
The Gestures
Poetry is about something. It is neither wordplay for its own sake nor navelgazing. I believe with the ancients that “as above, so below”; but for me “below” is the self and “above” is history, which includes the future.
Miss-Communication
Funded by the Markievicz Award in the Republic of Ireland, which commemorates Irish women of the past hundred years, on International Women’s Day Joanna Walsh’s AI, by her very existence, poses some questions: how does gender relate to language? How are women’s words and history recorded and commemorated? What is the economic status of the contemporary female ‘content provider’? And where, in our digital world, does creative autonomy reside?
Two Digital Paintings
Two digital paintings with surreal qualities
Cassandra Atherton Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“My various visits to Japan and love of manga, anime and the kawaii aesthetic have influenced the neo-surreal aspects of my prose poetry…”
from FAILSAFE: a choreography
New from Scott Thurston, FAILSAFE is an ongoing series of choreographic prose poems: Amongst them I found behind whenever you remember: prepare a meal for God. A lighter touch, toy soldiers rescale. This edge, again, of how far to dress up, curate and present the desperate and contingent. Realised I’d interpreted space behind as moving backwards.
Pessoa’s Dream
Pessoa’s Dream” is a stream-of-consciousness poem that begins and ends as a reflection on Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and which, in between those reflections, emerges as a whistle-stop tour of literary and philosophical associations — James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau, Slavoj Zizek and Stefan Zweig all get a mention whilst René Guenon, although not mentioned by name, lingers in the periphery.
Jane Yeh Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I’m probably drawn to the surreal because I’m easily bored. When I’m in the process of writing a poem, I’m mainly trying to keep myself interested in each line and what might come next, so taking leaps of imagination or language are what I’ve found will most engage my attention.”
Indefatigable
These pieces form part of a project I'm currently working on in which I imagine myself as an island.
An Encounter
I always went to the edge of the woods when I needed to be alone. On the far side, before it dropped down to the railway line, there was a low dry-stone wall, crumbling away, that made the perfect seat. It was incredibly peaceful; you could hear yourself think, work things out in your head. Once an hour, there was a roar of the high-speed train from the city, like a round of applause.
Twisted, Crumpled
Twisted, Crumpled is a new story by C. D. Rose: No one knows what the man, who may have been a Danish film director or a French art dealer or a Ukrainian journalist, was doing in the Pallonetto, a neighbourhood rarely frequented by tourists even of the more intrepid kind. No one, victim and perp aside, saw the theft happen. The man had been walking along the seafront at Santa Lucia, it was suggested, and only ended up in the warren of the Pallonetto as he attempted to give chase to the tyke.
Unwanted Colour Schemes
All this is very much existential poetry in its various forms. The poems are layered and intellectually meant to involve the reader - one which I hope would allow him or her to enter a world which stretches the imagination, opens up new perspectives and alternative fields of creativity.
Carrie Etter Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“At times it seems the surreal can convey the truth of an experience or emotion most accurately--that only by changing or bending the rules of what's possible can we appreciate how something in the world works.”
A Matter of Opinion
Up in the state capital, the legislature was debating a bill designed to make it tougher for workers injured on the job to become millionaires. Robinson A. Rocker, whose carpal-tunnel syndrome accounted for his fervent opposition to the proposal, was—to the further detriment of his wrists—typing a spirited editorial in favour of it when Bev, the newsroom receptionist, poked her head in the fishbowl, as everybody, excluding him, called his small glass-enclosed office.
Artefacts of Articulation
These poems came about in the course of my ongoing efforts to understand consciousness. The lines aspire to an Escherian geometry (unsettling familiarity--of seeing, thinking, and feeling--in ways) often associated with poetry. I feel my poetry is intimate--reflecting conscious experience itself within itself.
Ghosts Passing along Sunset Boulevard
A new story by Hiromi Suzuki: I go out to buy a toothbrush or something, return to my apartment keeping with coins in pocket of my overcoat. I am not sure whether I should choose a light bulb of 80 or 100 watts for my bathroom. The light bulb in my brain is also about to burn out. I cannot enter my room because of the lost key.
Birds of Los Angeles
A photo-collage by Hiromi Suzuki, to run concurrently with her short story Ghosts Passing along Sunset Boulevard up in Fiction
Point and Click
Point and Click is a new experiment that combines generative visual artwork with pointillist aesthetics, in order to create a type of new media that resembles old paintings. Taking inspiration from artists such as Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh, this work honours their contributions by applying their methods to art created through artificial programs.
The never-ending quest…
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